Lady of Poison_ The Priests - Bruce R. Cordell [109]
The lowering void contracted. Sight was taken from Marrec. All sound ceased. Even the sound of the cleric's own heartbeat was denied him. Marrec wondered if perhaps he should have heeded Ususi's warning about dealing with demons.
Hearing returned and sight, too. The wide lane was entirely clear of blighted volodnis and twigblights. Neither the blood, the sap, nor the bodies of those already slain, nor the surging mass who a minute earlier had been intent of overwhelming Marrec and his friends remained.
Of the void, only a blot of darkness persisted, almost lost in the rain-streaked night sky, visible only as an absence when lightning streaked.
The queen spoke. "It is finished. If we meet ever again, you shall discover the fate that has befallen your foes." Then the void, too, was gone.
The crashing thunder echoed hollowly down the lane.
"Forward, then," urged Marrec. His voice was hoarse, rough from the fear that had sleeted through him before the darkness lifted.
No one replied. Perhaps all were feeling an emotion similar to Marrec's. The cleric's relief was tempered with the knowledge that they had yet even to break the perimeter of the Close, and already he had used up the one resource he had thought to unleash on the Rotting Man himself.
It would have to be his petrifying gaze, then, should he get so far, he decided. What an awful surprise it was to him that he would at last come to rely on the evil aspect of himself that he had so long sought to forget and suppress.
Their footsteps clattered on the wet stone of the lane. The tops of the petrified trees towered over their heads as they approached, the branch tips lost in the lightning-rent clouds. Marrec sighted a space between two of the great trunks wide enough to pass two abreast and moved toward the cavity.
They were in. They walked a narrowing path of mud, mold, and mulch of long-dead leaves between two great boles, each as wide and tall as a cliff face. The rain couldn't reach into the tight space, and the sound of the thunder above was muffled. The light on Marrec's spear tip proved the only illumination.
"This is the perfect place for an ambush," noted Gunggari.
Marrec had entertained the same thought, yet they continued ahead unmolested. After about twenty paces, the aperture between the trees reached its narrowest, forcing Marrec to walk sideways. He shuffled forward quickly, certain that an attack was imminent, but no. The passage between the trees began to widen again.
They were through. They stepped into the Court of the Rotting Man.
The Court of the Rotting Man was a great plain encircled by petrified cliffs that towered into the sky. In truth, from within, the ring of colossal petrified trees resembled a steep caldera or crater heralding some ancient catastrophe.
When the court was the Nentyarch's Seat, the space within the ring of then-living trees had been green and filled with garden paths that wound through groves of flowers and fields of fruit trees, watered by carefully maintained brooks that passed around daisy fields and under quaint stone bridges.
With the coming of the Rotting Man, life had moldered and gone to rot. The paths were washed-out mud tracks, smelly and home to worms and stinging flies, the fruit trees bore only blots of poisonous putrescence, the brooks were dry, and the flowers long since dead. Great holes pockmarked the Court, throwing up great mounds of fresh, muddy earth in places, lending a cemetery feel to the entire space.
Carved back into the inner surfaces of the petrified trees were scores of doors, openings, and dark windows that hinted at chambers, halls, rooms, passages, and alcoves that could lie behind them. Catwalks connected passages from tree to tree. A veritable army could dwell therein: blighted volodnis, twigblights, blightlords, prisoners, slaves, and whatever other dreadful creatures the Rotting Man